python os.listdir() shows protected files

Question

So, I'm trying to make myself a Python script which goes through the selected Music folder and tells the user if specific album doesn't have an album cover. It basically goes through all the files and checks if file[-4:] in (".jpg",".bmp",".png"), if true, it found a picture file. Just to make it clear, the structure of my folders is:

• Music folder
  • Arctic Monkeys
    • Humbug (2009)
    • Suck it and see (2011)
  • Morphine
    • Cure For Pain (1993)

.. and so on. I'm testing the script to find if there's a missing cover in my Arctic Monkeys directory, and my script goes through the "Humbug (2009)" folder and finds AlbumArtSmall.jpg which doesn't show up in the command prompt so I tried "Show hidden files/folders" and still nothing. However, the files show up once I uncheck "Hide protected operating system files", so that's kinda weird.

My question is - how do I tell Python to skip searching the hidden/protected files? I checked out the How to ignore hidden files using os.listdir()? but the solution I found there only works for files starting with ".", and that's not what I need.

Cheers!

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Edit - so here's the code:

import os

def findCover(path, band, album):
    print os.path.join(path, band, album)
    coverFound = False

    for mFile in os.listdir(os.path.join(path, band, album)):
        if mFile[-4:] in (".jpg",".bmp",".png"):
            print "Cover file found - %s." % mFile
            coverFound = True
            return coverFound

musicFolder = "E:\Music"   #for example
noCovers = []

for band in os.listdir(musicFolder):    #iterate over bands inside the music folder
    if band[0:] == "Arctic Monkeys":    #only Arctic Monkeys
        print band
        bandFolder = os.path.join(musicFolder, band)
        for album in os.listdir(bandFolder):
            if os.path.isdir(os.path.join(bandFolder,album)):
                if findCover(musicFolder, band, album): #if cover found
                    pass                                #do nothing
                else:
                    print "Cover not found"
                    noCovers.append(band+" - "+album)   #append to list
            else:                       #if bandFolder is not actually a folder
                pass
        print ""

Answer 1

You can use with the pywin32 module, and manually test for FILE_ATTRIBUTE_HIDDEN or any number of attributes

FILE_ATTRIBUTE_ARCHIVE              = 32
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_ATOMIC_WRITE         = 512
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_COMPRESSED           = 2048
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DEVICE               = 64
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DIRECTORY            = 16
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_ENCRYPTED            = 16384
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_HIDDEN               = 2
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL               = 128
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NOT_CONTENT_INDEXED  = 8192
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_OFFLINE              = 4096
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_READONLY             = 1
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_REPARSE_POINT        = 1024
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_SPARSE_FILE          = 512
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_SYSTEM               = 4
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_TEMPORARY            = 256
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_VIRTUAL              = 65536
FILE_ATTRIBUTE_XACTION_WRITE        = 1024

like so:

import win32api, win32con

#test for a certain type of attribute
attribute = win32api.GetFileAttributes(filepath)
#The file attributes are bitflags, so you want to see if a given flag is 1.
# (AKA if it can fit inside the binary number or not) 
# 38 in binary is  100110 which means that 2, 4 and 32 are 'enabled', so we're checking for that
## Thanks to Nneoneo
if attribute & (win32con.FILE_ATTRIBUTE_HIDDEN | win32con.FILE_ATTRIBUTE_SYSTEM):
  raise Exception("hidden file") #or whatever

#or alter them
win32api.SetFileAttributes(filepath, win32con.FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL) #or FILE_ATTRIBUTE_HIDDEN

After you alter a file, take a look in the folder, it won't be hidden anymore.

Found this information here and here: Checking file attributes in python

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Alternatively, you can try to use the os.stat function, whose docs here and then use the stat module to further understand what you're looking at.

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